Maven -- whether you like it or not

As a relatively experienced Ant user, I usually try to avoid Maven, a build system intended to automate mundane and time consuming tasks such as project packaging and site generation.

Apparently, site generation is one of the most appreciated features of Maven. Given that the default site generated by Maven looks nice but otherwise is rather useless, you need to spend considerable amount of time to tame the results.

In the foreword of the book "Maven, A developer's notebook", Jason van Zyl states that "Maven is an incredibly boring technology". He goes on to say that if you use Maven, your development infrastructure will be so coherent, predictable and reproducible that you won't even think about it anymore.

Although his promise is alluring, I don't think it is fulfilled. For one, Maven is highly intrusive. It will heavily impact the structure of your project. For example, converting existing projects, even small ones, to Maven can be a painful experience. You need to adopt the Maven worldview to benefit from it. As far as Maven is concerned, it's ma-ven or the highway.

Don't get me wrong, Maven tackles the task of building projects, a very hard task to say the least. Your development infrastructure may indeed benefit from Maven. However, don't expect results without a heavy investment. Maven will cost you dearly, but so do Ant scripts. As discussed on the jakarta commons mailing lists, the question is which approach costs less. On BSF, Alan Gutierrez claims that Maven is a drag on productivity. Howard Lewis Ship explains in his blog the reasons why he has moved away from Maven. He also states (see comments section in his blog) that Maven 2 is a big imrovement over Maven 1.


Henri Yandel, who can be trusted to know a thing or two on multi-project builds, replies that Maven equals standardisation equals easy-to-understand. I think that that Henri summarizes the issue pretty well when he writes:

Slightly off-topic, if applying Maven to an Ant project, I would recommend trying to simplify your build system/code structure, don't hack Maven to fit the system you had in place for the Ant project. If you can't be standard-ish, stay in Ant - it's the right place for lots of customery.

As an alternative, you could mitigate the cost of dependency management (and only dependency management) with little known tool called Ivy which integrates well with Ant.